Explaining and Predicting Women`s Representation in Parliament: The Limitations of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

In a recent study (Krook 2010) suggests that Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) offers great leverage in the study of the determinants of women’s representation. In this analysis, I critically evaluate Krook`s (2010) claim. Through a partial QCA re-analysis of Krook’s (2010) data and a QCA evaluation of a medium sized dataset on women’s representation in Asia and Latin America, I present three weaknesses of QCA: (1) The configurations of explanatory variables that seemingly lead to high women’s representation are overtly complex (2) they have very low empirical coverage in that they only span over one or two countries and (3) they are very sensitive to coding. In the second part of the article, I argue that contrary to QCA, which fails to offer parsimonious conditions of explanatory variables that explain women`s representation in several countries, regression analysis provides greater leverage into the study of women in politics. In fact, I highlight that regression analysis allows for the identification of several key variables that push women`s representation. In my dataset, these factors are quotas and communist regime type.